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Drake Is The Most Illegally Downloaded Artist In The U.S. On BitTorrent

Even with music services such as iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, and free album streams on sites like Soundcloud, illegal downloading is still prevalent in the music industry.

The Digital Music Index was put together by Musicmetric, which measures trends of a music fan’s use of these online services all around the world. What was particularly interesting in their data was the analysis of worldwide BitTorrent networks. Spanning from 2011-2012, the company tracked music from a total of 750,000 artists and found a total of 405 million music releases were downloaded within the first six months of the year.

Below is a chart that breaks down each country and the number of illegal downloads. The number one artist in the U.S. was Drake. Elsewhere, Ed Sheeran topped the U.K., while Kanye West took the top slot in Canada.